Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the field of maritime navigation. More particularly, it relates to a system for providing maritime navigation information.
Description of the Problem and Related Art
The Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a 3,000-mile (4,800 km) inland waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Some sections of the waterway consist of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, and sounds, while others are man-made canals. It provides a navigable route along its length without many of the hazards of travel on the open sea.
The ICW runs for most of the length of the eastern seaboard, from its unofficial northern terminus at the Manasquan River in New Jersey, where it connects with the Atlantic Ocean at the Manasquan Inlet, then around the Gulf of Mexico to Brownsville, Tex. The waterway consists of three non-contiguous segments: the Gulf Intracoastal Water, extending from Brownsville, Tex., east to Carrabelle, Fla.; a second section of the Gulf ICW, beginning at Tarpon Springs, Fla., and extending south to Fort Myers, Fla.; and the Atlantic ICW, extending from Key West, Fla., to Norfolk, Va. (milepost 0.0). These segments were intended to be connected via a dredged waterway from St. Marks, Fla. to Tarpon Springs and the Cross Florida Barge Canal across northern Florida, but these projects were never completed due to environmental concerns. Additional canals and bays extend a navigable waterway to Boston, Mass.
The ICW has a good deal of commercial activity; barges hauled petroleum, petroleum products, food stuffs, building materials, and manufactured goods. It is also used extensively by recreational boaters. On the east coast, some of the traffic in fall and spring is by transient boat owners who regularly move their vessel south in winter and north in summer. The waterway is also used when the ocean is too rough for travel. Numerous inlets connect the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico with the ICW.
The ICW connects to several navigable rivers where shipping traffic can travel to inland ports, including the Mississippi, Alabama, Savannah, James, Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, and Connecticut rivers.
Since 1824, the US Army Corps of Engineers has had the responsibility of maintaining the ICW. Today, federal law provides for the waterway to be maintained at a minimum depth of 12 feet Mean Low Water (MLW) (3.7 m) for most of its length.
Inadequate funding has either prevented maintenance of the ICW or caused it to be “crisis focused” maintenance only. Consequently, for larger vessels, shoaling or shallow waters are encountered along several sections of the waterway, with these having 7-feet (2.1 m) or 9-feet (2.7 m) minimum depths from earlier improvements. Navigation information using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Navigation Charts is highly suspect because the data is typically years out of date; FOIA hydrographic surveys (if available) are difficult to obtain and use for the typical boater; and institutional knowledge (senior boat captains/experienced ICW users) is limited and not well publicized. As a result, dependable information about channel location, alignment, depth, shoaling, and usability is challenging to obtain and suspect to use.
What is needed is a system and method for communicating waterway channel location and depth based on known marine traffic/use as determined by vessel keel depth, location, time, and tidal information (KVD) from deep draft vessels including tug boats, barges, sail boats, and other water craft.